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> And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet. This was always true, right? With enough $, you can empl
by loeg 5mo ago
> And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet.
This was always true, right? With enough $, you can employ N writers. But the constant factor is smaller than it once was.
- Retric 5mo agoOnly for relatively low values of N. It’s really difficult to scale organizations up and down for election cycles. Historically you’d quickly reach a point where each additional writer was more expensive than the last.
- tstrimple 5mo agoThey aren't scaled down between election cycles. The media ecosystem is almost fully captured by the billionaire class. We've seen directly how they change coverage and policies tilting things. Fox News never shut down between elections. They are always in campaign mode and the money keeps rolling in.
- Retric 5mo agoThat’s the low N I was talking about. As long as you can use those writers to operate a business near profitably then they are really cheap, but FOX can’t profitably employ 100,000 writers.
- avaer 5mo agoThere were times and places in history where truth was valued, respected, and rewarded. You could not employ N writers even if you had the money, because there were not enough good writers. And they needed to care about remaining adjacent to reality, or their reputation would (rightfully) be ruined as a fraud. Things were slow enough that the average person could see that they were being bullshat. These were the golden ages of human progress. It's not the world we live in today.
- loeg 5mo agoThe writers didn't need to be "good" for this kind of work.